Abstract

RECALDE, Gabriela; BLANCO, Tania Luna  and  BONILLA MALDONADO, Daniel. Justice of the Poor: A Genealogy of Colombian Legal Clinics. Rev. Derecho [online]. 2017, n.47, pp.4-72. ISSN 0121-8697.

The article presents a genealogy of Colombian legal clinics. The article offers a narrative that allows for a better understanding of the emergence of legal clinics in the country's legal system, its transformations and the theoretical foundations that support them. The article argues that legal clinics are a transplant of US experiential legal education. According to the Law and Development movement, legal clinics emerged in the Colombian legal system as an instrument to question and eliminate Colombia's formalist legal education and practices. However, the article also argues that this is an objective that has not been fulfilled. Legal clinics were promptly coopted by the country's formalist legal education and practice, as well as by an assistentialist interpretation of free legal services for the poor. The article also argues that public interest legal clinics, inheritors of traditional legal clinics, despite their youth and emancipatory purposes, run the same risk due to the marginality of experiential legal education in the country's law schools. Finally, the genealogy presented in this article offers a critical reflection of the pedagogical and social justice goals pursued by traditional and public interest legal clinics. Both, the article argues, are key to the construction of a just political community.

Keywords : legal clinics; access to justice; legal transplants and public interest law.

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